Job creation: Where are the startups?

paper out with a simple title: "The Collapse of Startups in Job Creation". "
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Tim Kane, at the Hudson Institute, has a new paper out with a simple title: “The Collapse of Startups in Job Creation”. His paper is basically a slightly politicized version of the charts put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics last month, under the headline “Entrepreneurship and the U.S. Economy”. The first two charts are particularly striking. The first one looks at the number of startups in America — companies less than one year old.

This shows a reasonably steady rise in entrepreneurship from 1994 to 2006, then a collapse as the housing bubble bursts, and — most worryingly of all — no recovery at all after the recession ends. Instead, we have significantly fewer startups right now than we did even at the depths of the recession.

If you look at the number of jobs at these startups, rather than the number of startups, the picture is equally bad, although the decline is older. This series peaked back in 2000, and has been declining ever since:

This doesn’t make a lot of intuitive sense. As Kane writes,

Economic theory suggests that the modern economy offers a better environment for even more entrepreneurship. First, there is a wider technology frontier to explore. Second, a wealthier society enables more individuals to explore rather than merely work to survive. Third, the shift to services requires less startup capital than manufacturing or agriculture. In other words, the downward trend in the rate of entrepreneurship should, in theory, have rebounded by now.

Kane thinks that it’s something to do with taxes and regulations; I don’t buy it. But he also has a globalization argument:

An American entrepreneur has zero tax or regulatory burden when hiring a consultant/contractor who resides abroad. But that same employer is subject to paperwork, taxation, and possible IRS harassment if employing U.S.-based contractors.

Are jobs at US startups effectively being offshored? I don’t know. But I do know that small business is where the jobs are, in this economy. Here’s the chart:

The green line, at the top, is the number of jobs at small businesses, with less than 50 employees. The red line, underneath it, is the number of jobs at medium-sized businesses, with somewhere between 50 and 500 employees. And the steadily-declining blue line, at the bottom, is the number of jobs at large businesses with more than 500 employees. Clearly, if we want to boost job creation, the best place to look is not the blue line but the green line. And equally clearly there has been an increase in the number of jobs at small firms overall, since the recession ended.

So if small firms in general are hiring again, what’s the problem with startups? Kane has run the numbers back to 1989, to come up with this chart:

There’s really nothing predictable about the dismal showing in the last three years of this chart — and especially not in the last two years, when we’ve had a recovery accompanied by record-low interest rates.

Admittedly, all of these numbers are low: at their peak, startups employed only a little more than 1% of the population, and now they employ a little less than 1% of the population. Concentrating on startups is not going to move the broader employment needle very much. But the dynamic here is surprising and troubling, all the same. Intuitively, if people can’t find work for an existing company, they should be more likely, not less likely, to go out and found a new company themselves, instead. But that doesn’t seem to be happening.

The only thing I can think of here is that for all that we think of startups as being largely high-tech things, in reality a huge number of them are in the construction industry, in one way or another. In a word, subcontractors. And no one’s starting new granite-countertop installation companies right now. But still, startups are a decent proxy for the dynamism of an economy. And these charts don’t bode at all well, on that front.